The flight deck on an aircraft carrier is like a perfectly choreographed ballet. And to ensure that unmanned autonomous aircraft fit right in, researchers at MIT are developing a system that will let drones recognise and follow gestures from the flight crew.
Shiva Ayyadurai, pictured above, is a shimmering intellectual. He holds four degrees from MIT (where he lectures), numerous patents, honours and awards. He also says he invented email, and there’s a global conspiracy against him. Guess which one of these statements is true.
It doesn’t matter how many signal relay towers blanket your city, the quality of your wireless reception can often change drastically — sometimes within a few steps. But MIT researchers think they’ve figured out how to improve reception using error correcting codes that work regardless of signal noise.
The Hobbit being shot at 48fps? Pathetic. MIT’s trillion fps camera? Pokey at best. Just wait until you see the video a team of German researchers have created. It’s two frames long, lasts just 50 femtoseconds, and doesn’t star Nic Cage.
MIT’s city car concept has been in the pipeline for a long time, but until now there’s been nothing other than illustrations and half-size models. The real thing is here, and it’s about to go into testing in Europe.
That fancy high-speed Phantom camera is pretty much a child’s toy when compared to MIT’s new hardware which can record at 1,000,000,000,000 frames per second. Fast enough to capture slow motion footage of light waves.
Not merely satisfied with having the the top research labs develop robotic dogs and cheetahs and humans, DARPA’s latest endeavour will see the military agency team up with MIT to develop FastRunner, a robotic ostrich capable of outrunning us all.
Charles Guan, recent MIT grad, is certainly a certifiable tinkerer. Where I see a skateboard and a snowblower engine he sees a portable off-road skateboard. Completely DIY, it got noticed at the World Maker Faire New York on Saturday.
